Strange how these themes repeat over the years, for whatever reason.
Indeed. Could be an example of some sort of universal human attribute, perhaps linked to our psychiatry or early childhood experiences.
There's the Tokoloshe, for example, in many African cultures- a diminutive humanoid with large eyes and a large head (almost like an Ewok). Sounds a lot like a grey...
to cut a long story short, we were pretty certain after a while that it was something called 'storm shadow' a type of cruise missile.
Sometimes it isn't even obscure/secret military aircraft, but mundane things... an aircraft at night can be mistaken for an unidentified phenomena by an uninformed person, and I recall personally seeing a cluster of party balloons in the sky that looked pretty strange, and startling at first.
Not to mention things like weather balloons or illuminated dirigibles... or sometimes even planets.
That there's no way they could look like us, as in humanoid form i guess... assumes that they'd have to evolve completely separate from us and life on earth (with no room for just plain cooincidence to boot) , or that creatures like that even evolved naturally at all and aren't made specifically to interact with us - like say engineered creatures or machines made by a von neumann probe. Maybe the greys for example, are just the aliens asimos. Or the 'space brothers' are genetically engineered from human samples... There's no reason to assume blind luck made a nordic alien look like dolph lungren or vice versa.
I'm not saying that your point is entirely wrong that you might expect things to look very different, and not like a cheap tv scifi with little effects budget so the aliens all look like normal people... but any speculation on what these things could look like is still pure speculation all we really know, or believe is that life which looks like us, humanoid forms can evolve to an advanced state on an earthlike world.
Essentially, I think to dismiss it by saying that there's no way that they could look like that seems to lack imagination, or perhaps originates from a time when ideas like panspermia, or engineering new life forms, or really advanced machines that are life-like also seemed very far fetched, as far fetched as interstellar travel seemed at a certain point, i think most of us would accept that given enough advancement, or enough time, interstellar travel is an acceptable concept.
The thing is... there's no law that states evolution
has to pan out like it did here. There are an infinite number of possibilities of why it would not. The many different organisms on Earth are an example of this.
A simple organism doesn't
have the genetics to turn into an eukaryote, a vertebrate, a mammal etc... that is all up to random mutation and the geological and environmental factors over a period of hundreds of millions of years. Panspermia is generally considered to be limited to simple organisms (i.e. bacteria) or even pre-life, if it is possible across interstellar distances at all.
A good example is the "Dinosauroid" by Dale Russell, a postulation of what Stenonychosaurous (now known to be synonymous with Troodon) would look like if it had not gone extinct and had continued to evolve and become more intelligent.
His result was essentially a lizard man (not unlike a Reptoid). Apart from the lack of feathers (which can be considered to be a case of Science Marching On), it's pretty much laughable- many paleontologists admit that such a body plan is downright silly for a creature that is simply
not human, and it would still have mostly dinosaurian features even if it had evolved intelligence. There's no reason why an intelligent organism has to look like a human- if the K/T impactor had missed, and troodontids had evolved sapience, Earthlings would have been
totally different, and it's quite possible (and they might have their own version of "Greys" or even the vicious Mammal Men...). And this is with an organism that is actually quite similar to us.
I'm not saying that such organisms would not share
any attributes with us- it's likely things like limbs, eyes, jaws will be relatively commonplace because they're evolutionarily
good ideas (and natural history has proven it- such traits have evolved multiple times). But I think that considering the evolution of humanoids, is conversely the conservative or "unimaginitive view", because there is simply a mind boggling number of possibilities out there, and nothing at all to say that it
has to turn out one way. Of course there is no law against such organisms evolving (we're living proof), but it's simply very unlikely. And while it certainly is speculation, it's based in scientific research- there are many people dedicated to research in this field.
Your suggestion of the Space Brothers being engineered humans is a good one; it might make sense for the aliens to breed or raise humans as ambassadors to the natives (a la
Avatar).
I don't see how a Grey could be a particularly sensible design for a robot though... if anything an alien race would base it's robots off it's own physique, if not they would look like copying machines or MER rovers (and apparently some abductees do report such "robots"). If they're an attempt at making a "human" that would fit in, they're a pretty lousy one... they tend to be more horrifying than comforting which is probably not desirable.
Assuming it's a real thing, are they even friendly? perhaps not all the time...
Are humans friendly?
Not all the time.
